The Inevitable Demise of the DVD

Netflix's third quarter earnings came in yesterday, along with annoucements that its business was shifting focus to its online streaming service and away from its original DVD-by-mail service. This is just the latest sign that the prevalence of physical media may be coming to an end. While I think it's doubtful that all media we consume will be in digital form, and I certainly prefer having something physical to put on the shelf when purchasing films and televisions shows, I have to say I'm not sorry to see the age of the DVD go. I hate DVDs.

It's hard to imagine it now, with DVDs so prevalent, but the transition from the VHS tape to the DVD as the dominant media format was a slow one. DVDs were introduced in the US in 1997, but it wasn't until 2003 that rentals and sales began outpacing VHS tapes, and many content providers were wary that the new format wasn't going to catch on. I remember Disney being a notable holdout, waiting until 2000 to start releasing its back catalogue of animated films on DVD. At that point, the superficially similar laserdisc format had been around since the 70s and was never popular except with the hardcore technology geeks. The benefits of the DVD seem to be obvious in hindsight: vastly greater storage capability in a more compact form, slower degradation, and better resistance to repeated playing. All those fancy extras like director commentaries, multiple language tracks, and turning on and off subtitles became possible. Also, you never, ever need to rewind a DVD when you're finished watching a movie. But I still hate them.

DVDs, along with CDs and all their variants are far, far more user unfriendly than just about every other media format ever made for mass consumption. From the beginning, using DVDs and CDs was an annoyance. It was a struggle to get jewel cases open. It was a struggle to get the discs off the plastic hubs holding them in place in the cases. If you didn't hold the discs by their edges and avoid rough handling, they would end up smudged or scratched, affecting their playability. If you didn't put them back just right, the discs would slip and end up scratched. It's no wonder people were reluctant to switch. Say what you will about VHS, but I could stack the cassettes on top of each other, drop them on the floor, and bang them against the VCR without worry. And no matter how badly the picture quality degraded, or became clouded with static, at least they were still playable. I still borrow movies from the public library all the time, but when I borrow DVDs I've taken to checking them for scratches before taking them home.

I don't want to go back to the VHS days, but I still use a VCR to record shows I want to timeshift, and sometimes I find it a relief to see shelves of the old clamshell boxes along the back wall of the library. VHS tapes may be dinosaurs, but they never inspired the kind of frustration and rage that DVDs have managed to provoke from me over the years. I've literally spent hours trying to coax scratched rental discs to advance a few more frames after they freeze at a critical juncture in a movie or TV show. I've lost major scenes in films like "Waitress," and had to forego the endings of Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" and Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters." I know all the tricks for fixing scratches, but none of them work 100% of the time. Too often, I've had to listen to the endless click-whir, click-whirr of my player or laptop trying to read the damaged sections of a disc, before finally giving up and going to Youtube to find out how my movie ended. These aren't just the library discs, mind you, but ones I've occasionally gotten from Blockbuster and Netflix too.

Streaming services may have their hiccups, and they don't have all the wonderful extras that come with DVDs yet, but there's no comparison when it comes to usability. I don't have to worry about whether a film is going to stop halfway through, or if it's picture is going to erupt into cascades of green and magenta pixels, no matter how many people have used the same file before me. I don't have to handle a digital file gingerly - I don't have to handle it at all. Many people like making digital backup copies of their DVDs, and I have to wonder why you'd bother keeping the DVDs around after ripping them, especially now that it's gotten so much easier to watch internet content on regular old TV screens. I still like having physical media, and would gladly buy movies in flashdrive form if they were made available, but I can't wait for the discs to go.

One day in the future, I look forward to replacing all my DVDs, and taking the obsolete discs out to the park to play Frisbees with. Or shoot skeet with. Or use as a coaster set. Or maybe I'll just send them off to the library, to gather dust and keep the old VHS collection company.

Waiting for Guillermo

Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" looks like it may finally begin filming soon, now that the cast has been announced, the labor issues are getting resolved, and rights-holder MGM is likely to merge with Lionsgate and finally emerge from limbo. Hopefully it will be a chance for Jackson to improve on his last film, the underwhelming "The Lovely Bones." However, the news also marks the advancement of yet another project that Guillermo del Toro, who had been tapped to helm "The Hobbit" up until a few months ago, is not directing. I was at the Comic Con Disney panel this summer, where Del Toro appeared to confirm his involvement in the new "Haunted Mansion" reboot. A few days later, it was clarified that Del Toro would be producing and possibly writing, but would not direct. Finally, at the end of September, he announced that he would direct an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," for Universal, to be produced by James Cameron.

But first, he needs to finish writing "Trollhunters" and stump for "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," the horror film that Disney recently delayed. Del Toro is also associated with at least a dozen other future film projects, including new versions of "Pinocchio," "Tarzan," "Frankenstein," "Van Helsing," "The Witches," and "Slaughterhouse Five." He's also involved with feature adaptations of the upcoming novel "Drood," the comic "Deadman," the animated short "Alma," and original projects "Saturn and the End of Days" and "The Coffin." Of course many fans are still hopeful that a third "Hellboy" movie is still a possibility. Personally, I'm the most interested in the third film in his planned "Spanish Civil War" trilogy, tentatively titled "3993," which would follow 2001's "The Devil's Backbone" and 2006's "Pan's Labyrinth."

There's no telling which of these films are actually going to be made. One of the older projects that I was looking forward to was "Domu," the Katsuhiro Otomo manga that Del Toro was reportedly dying to adapt back in the late 90s. It doesn't get mentioned on any of the lists of Del Toro's upcoming films anymore. Many of the others that he's producing are those that Del Toro was initially planning to direct and ended up passing on to other directors. Some have suggested that he's been overwhelmed by the wealth of opportunities that opened up to him after the success of "Pan's Labyrinth" in 2007. The last film that Guillermo del Toro actually directed was "Hellboy: The Golden Army," which was released in the summer of 2008. Looking at his current slate, his next will be "At the Mountains of Madness," which is projected for sometime in 2012.

Four years isn't a huge gap between films for a director. James Cameron, for instance, took twelve years between "Titanic" and "Avatar," with a few documentaries during the interval to remind us he was still around. However, the size of the slate that Del Toro is taking on has many observers raising eyebrows, and so many of the titles are fanboy-friendly that the hype and anticipation surrounding his projects keeps growing. The longer the gap grows between Del Toro's projects, the greater the expectations. "The Hobbit" situation was a setback that wasn't his fault, but I'm worried that since Del Toro's next will be a pet horror project based on non-mainstream material, he may be setting himself up for a fall.

Because Del Toro hasn't spent the capital from his triumph with "Pan's Labyrinth," he hasn't really had his chance to put a film forward based on the strength of his own name. He's lent his name to promote smaller films like "The Orphanage," and the "Hellboy" sequel highlighted him as director, but there hasn't been anything that's felt like a true follow-up to "Labyrinth." I think this is because Del Toro as a director feels like one of his beloved monsters, namely Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His more commercial films like "Blade II," "Mimic," and the "Hellboy" films are decent, but feel very different from his weightier, more impressive Spanish language projects, where he has more creative freedom. I'm still waiting to see Del Toro truly unleashed on a mainstream film, but on the other hand I'm not sure if that's such a good idea.

I found "Hellboy: The Golden Army" disappointing compared to the original, and I wonder whether it's because Del Toro had fewer constraints. There were clear signs that he got too bogged down in the gorgeous visuals and neglected the script. The film was a bad clash between his two different sensibilities, with tonal issues all over the place. Will Del Toro improve upon his next outing? Will he bomb? The added pressure of growing expectations is just going to get worse the longer he's absent from theater screens, and would compound any perceived failure. On the other hand, I doubt a bomb or two would be the end of Del Toro. Audiences are nothing if not forgiving, and they have notoriously short memories, as the career of M. Night Shyamalan proves.

Not that I think Guillermo del Toro should be compared to M. Night Shyamalan, or even Peter Jackson. One thing Del Toro has in his favor is that he's been working in Hollywood for a good long while, and "Pan's Labyrinth" wasn't his first major film or even his fifth. He's already has his ups and downs, and I think that's what we'll continue to see from him in the future.

We'll just have to wait (and wait, and wait) and see.